How can indie authors raise their game through academic-style rigour? How might AI tools fit into a thoughtful research process without replacing the joy of discovery? Melissa Addey explores the intersection of scholarly discipline, creative writing, and the practical realities of building an author career.

In the intro, mystery and thriller tropes [Wish I'd Known Then]; The differences between trad and indie in 2026 [Productive Indie Fiction Writer]; Five phases of an author business [Becca Syme]; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn;

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Melissa Addey is an award-winning historical fiction author with a PhD in creative writing from the University of Surrey. She was the Leverhulme Trust Writer in Residence at the British Library, and now works as campaigns lead for the Alliance of Independent Authors.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

Making the leap from a corporate career to full-time writing with a young family
Why Melissa pursued a PhD in creative writing and how it fuelled her author business
What indie authors can learn from academic rigour when researching historical fiction
The problems with academic publishing—pricing, accessibility, and creative restrictions
Organising research notes, avoiding accidental plagiarism, and knowing when to stop researching
Using AI tools effectively as part of the research process without losing your unique voice

You can find Melissa at MelissaAddey.com.

Transcript of the interview with Melissa Addey

JOANNA: Melissa Addey is an award-winning historical fiction author with a PhD in creative writing from the University of Surrey. She was the Leverhulme Trust Writer in Residence at the British Library, and now works as campaigns lead for the Alliance of Independent Authors. Welcome back to the show, Melissa.

MELISSA: Hello. Thank you for having me.

JOANNA: It's great to have you back. You were on almost a decade ago, in December 2016, talking about merchandising for authors. That is really a long time ago.

So tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and self-publishing.

MELISSA: I had a regular job in business and I was writing on the side. I did a couple of writing courses, and then I started trying to get published, and that took seven years of jumping through hoops. There didn't seem to be much progress.

At some point, I very nearly had a small publisher, but we clashed over the cover because there was a really quite hideous suggestion that was not going to work. I think by that point I was really tired of jumping through hoops, really trying to play the game traditional publishing-wise.

I just went, you know what? I've had enough now. I've done everything that was asked of me and it's still not working. I'll just go my own way.

I think at the time that would've been 2015-ish. Suddenly, self-publishing was around more. I could see people and hear people talking about it, and I thought, okay, let's read everything there is to know about this.

I had a little baby at the time and I would literally print off stuff during the day to read—probably loads of your stuff—and read it at two o'clock in the morning breastfeeding babies. Then I'd go, okay, I think I understand that bit now, I'll understand the next bit, and so on.

So I got into self-publishing and I really, really enjoyed it. I've been doing it ever since. I'm now up to 20 books in the last 10 or 11 years. As you say, I did the creative writing PhD along the way, working with ALLi and doing workshops for others—mixing and matching lots of different things. I really enjoy it.

JOANNA: You mentioned you had a job before in business.

Are you full-time in all these roles that you're doing now, or do you still have that job?

MELISSA: No, I'm full-time now. I only do writing-related things. I left that in 2015, so I took a jump. I was on maternity leave and I started applying for jobs to go back to, and I suddenly felt like, oh, I really don't want to. I want to do the writing.

I thought, I've got about one year's worth of savings. I could try and do the jump. I remember saying to my husband, “Do you think it would be possible if I tried to do the jump? Would that be okay?”

There was this very long pause while he thought about it. But the longer the pause went on, the more I was thinking, ooh, he didn't say no, that is out of the question, financially we can't do that. I thought, ooh, it's going to work. So I did the jump.

JOANNA: That's great. I did something similar and took a massive pay cut and downsized and everything back in the day. Having a supportive partner is so important.

The other thing I did—and I wonder if you did too—I said to Jonathan, my husband, if within a year this is not going in a positive direction, then I'll get another job.

How long did you think you would leave it before you just gave up? And how did that go?

Because that beginning is so difficult, especially with a new baby.

MELISSA: I thought, well, I'm at home anyway, so I do have more time than if I was in a full-time job. The baby sleeps sometimes—if you're lucky—so there are little gaps where you could really get into it.

I had a year of savings/maternity pay going on, so I thought I've got a year. And the funny thing that happened was within a few months, I went back to my husband and I was like, I don't understand.

I said, all these doors are opening—they weren't massive, but they were doors opening. I said, but I've wanted to be a writer for a long time and none of these doors have opened before.

He said, “Well, it's because you really committed. It's because you jumped. And when you jump, sometimes the universe is on board and goes, yes, all right then, and opens some doors for you.”

It really felt like that. Even little things—like Mslexia (a writing magazine) gave me a little slot to do an online writer-in-residence thing. Just little doors opened that felt like you were getting a nod, like, yes, come on then, try.

Then the PhD was part of that. I applied to do that and it came with a studentship, which meant I had three years of funding coming in. That was one of the biggest creative gifts that's ever been given to me—three years of knowing you've got enough money coming in that you can just try and make it work.

By the time that finished, the royalties had taken over from the studentship. That was such a gift.

JOANNA: A couple of things there. I've got to ask about that funding. You're saying it was a gift, but that money didn't just magically appear.

You worked really hard to get that funding, I presume.

MELISSA: I did, yes. You do have to do the work for it, just to be clear.

My sister had done a PhD in an entirely different subject. She said, “You should do a PhD in creative writing.” I said, “That'd be ridiculous. Nobody is going to fund that. Who's going to fund that?” She said, “Oh, they might. Try.”

So I tried, and the deadline was something stupid like two weeks away. I tried and I got shortlisted, but I didn't get it. I thought, ah, but I got shortlisted with only two weeks to try. I'll try again next year then.

So then I tried again the next year and that's when I got it. It does take work. You have to put in quite a lot of effort to make your case. But it's a very joyful thing if you get one.

JOANNA: So let's go to the bigger question: why do a PhD in creative writing?

Let's be clear to everyone—you don't need even a bachelor's degree to be a successful author. Stephen King is a great example of someone who isn't particularly educated in terms of degrees. He talks about writing his first book while working at a laundry. You can be very successful with no formal education.

So why did you want to do a PhD? What drew you to academic research?

MELISSA: Absolutely. I would briefly say, I often meet people who feel they must do a qualification before they're allowed to write. I say, do it if you'd like to, but you don't have to. You could just practise the writing. I fully agree with that.

It was a combination of things. I do actually like studying. I do actually enjoy the research—that's why I do historical research. I like that kind of work. So that's one element.

Another element was the funding. I thought, if I get that funding, I've got three years to build up a back catalogue of books, to build up the writing. It will give me more time. So that was a very practical financial issue.

Also, children. My children were very little. I had a three-year-old and a baby, and everybody went, “Are you insane? Doing a PhD with a three-year-old and a baby?” But the thing about three-year-olds and babies is they're quite intellectually boring.

Emotionally, very engaging—on a number of levels, good, bad, whatever—but they're not very intellectually stimulating. You're at home all day with two small children who think that hide and seek is the highlight of intellectual difficulty because they've hidden behind the curtains and they're shuffling and giggling.

I felt I needed something else. I needed something for me that would be interesting.

I've always enjoyed passing on knowledge. I've always enjoyed teaching people, workshops, in whatever field I was in. I thought, if I want to do that for writing at some point, it will sound more important if I've done a PhD.

Not that you need that to explain how to do writing to someone if you do a lot of writing. But there were all these different elements that came together.

JOANNA: So to summarise: you enjoy the research, it's an intellectual challenge, you've got the funding, and there is something around authority. In terms of a PhD—and just for listeners, I'm doing a master's at the moment in death, religion, and culture.

MELISSA: Your topic sounds fascinating.

JOANNA: It is interesting because, same as you, I enjoy research. Both of us love research as part of our fiction process and our nonfiction.

I'm also enjoying the intellectual challenge, and I've also considered this idea of authority in an age of AI when it is increasingly easy to generate books—let's just say it, it's easy to generate books.

So I was like, well, how do I look at this in a more authoritative way? I wanted to talk to you because even just a few months back into it—and I haven't done an academic qualification for like two decades—it struck me that the academic rigour is so different.

What lessons can indie authors learn from this kind of academic rigour?

What do you think of in terms of the rigour and what can we learn?

MELISSA: I think there are a number of things. First of all, really making sure that you are going to the quality sources for things—the original sources, the high-quality versions of things.

Not secondhand, but going back to those primary sources. Not “somebody said that somebody said something.” Well, let's go back to the original. Have a look at that, because you get a lot from that.

I think you immerse yourself more deeply. Someone can tell you, “This is how they spoke in the 1800s.” If you go and read something that was written in the 1800s, you get a better sense of that than just reading a dictionary of slang that's been collated for you by somebody else. So I think that immerses you more deeply.

Really sticking with that till you've found interesting things that spark creativity in you. I've seen people say, “I used to do all the historical research. Nowadays I just fact-check. I write what I want to write and I fact-check.”

I think, well, that's okay, but you won't find the weird little things. I tend to call it “the footnotes of history.” You won't find the weird little things that really make something come alive, that really make a time and a place come alive.

I've got a scene in one of my Regency romances—which actually I think are less full of historical emphasis than some of my other work—where a man gives a woman a gift. It's supposed to be a romantic gift and maybe slightly sensual.

He could have given her a fan and I could have fact-checked and gone, “Are there fans? Yes, there are fans. Do they have pretty romantic poems on them? Yes, they do. Okay, that'll do.”

Actually, if you go round and do more research than that, you discover they had things like ribbons that held up your stockings, on which they wrote quite smutty things in embroidery. That's a much more sexy and interesting gift to give in that scene. But you don't find that unless you go doing a bit of research.

If I just fact-check, I'm not going to find that because it would never have occurred to me to fact-check it in the first place.

JOANNA: I totally agree with you. One of the wonderful things about research—and I also like going to places—is you might be somewhere and see something that gives you an idea you never, ever would have found in a book or any other way.

I used to call it “the serendipity of the stacks” in the physical library.

You go looking for a particular book and then you're in that part of the shelf and you find several other books that you never would have looked for. I think it's encouraging people, as you're saying, but I also think you have to love it.

MELISSA: Yes. I think some people find it a bit of a grind, or they're frightened by it and they think, “Have I done enough?”

JOANNA: Mm-hmm.

MELISSA: I get asked that a lot when I talk about writing historical fiction. People go, “But when do I stop? How do I know it's enough? How do I know there wasn't another book that would have been the book? Everyone will go, ‘Oh, how did you not read such-and-such?'”

I always say there are two ways of finding out when you can stop. One is when you get to the bibliographies, you look through and you go, “Yep, read that, read that, read that. Nah, I know that one's not really what I wanted.” You're familiar with those bibliographies in a way that at the beginning you're not.

At the beginning, every single bibliography, you haven't read any of it. So that's quite a good way of knowing when to stop.

The other way is: can you write ordinary, everyday life? I don't start writing a book till I can write everyday life in that historical era without notes. I will obviously have notes if I'm doing a wedding or a funeral or a really specific battle or something.

Everyday life, I need to be able to just write that out of my own head. You need to be confident enough to do that.

JOANNA: One of the other problems I've heard from academics—people who've really come out of academia and want to write something more pop, even if it's pop nonfiction or fiction—they're also really struggling. It is a different game, isn't it?

For people who might be immersed in academia, how can they release themselves into doing something like self-publishing?

Because there's still a lot of stigma within academia.

MELISSA: You're going to get me on the academic publishing rant now. I think academic publishing is horrendous. Academics are very badly treated. I know quite a lot of academics and they have to do all the work. Nobody's helping them with indexing or anything like that.

The publisher will say things like, “Well, could you just cut 10,000 words out of that?” Just because of size. Out of somebody's argument that they're making over a whole work. No consideration for that.

The royalties are basically zilch. I've seen people's royalty statements come in, and the way they price the books is insane. They'll price a book at 70 pounds. I actually want that book for my research and I'm hesitating because I can't be buying all of them at that price. That's ridiculous.

I've got people who are friends or family who bring out a book, and I'm like, well, I would gladly buy your book and read it. It's priced crazy. It's priced only for institutions.

I think actually, if academia was written a little more clearly and open to the lay person—which if you are good at your work, you should be able to do—and priced a bit more in line with other books, that would maybe open up people to reading more academia.

You wouldn't have to make it “pop” as you say. I quite like pop nonfiction. But I don't think there would have to be such a gulf between those two. I think you could make academic work more readable generally.

I read someone's thesis recently and they'd made a point at the beginning of saying—I can't remember who it was—that so-and-so academic's point of view was that it should be readable and they should be writing accordingly.

I thought, wow, I really admired her for doing that. Next time I'm doing something like that, I should be putting that at the front as well. But the fact that she had to explain that at the beginning…

It wasn't like words of one syllable throughout the whole thing. I thought it was a very quality piece of writing, but it was perfectly readable to someone who didn't know about the topic.

JOANNA: I might have to get that name from you because I've got an essay on the Philosophy of Death. And as you can imagine, there's a heck of a lot of big words.

MELISSA: I know. I've done a PhD, but I still used to tense up a little bit thinking they're going to pounce on me. They're going to say that I didn't talk academic enough, I didn't sound fancy enough. That's not what it should be about, really.

In a way, you are locking people out of knowledge, and given that most academics are paid for by public funds, that knowledge really ought to be a little more publicly accessible.

JOANNA: I agree on the book price. I'm also buying books for my course that aren't in the library. Some of them might be 70 pounds for the ebook, let alone the print book. What that means is that I end up looking for secondhand books, when of course the money doesn't go to the author or the publisher.

The other thing that happens is it encourages piracy. There are people who openly talk about using pirate sites for academic works because it's just too expensive. If I'm buying 20 books for my home library, I can't be spending that kind of money. Why is it so bad?

Why is it not being reinvented, especially as we have done with indie authors for the wider genres? Has this at all moved into academia?

MELISSA: I think within academia there's a fear because there's the peer reviews and it must be proven to be absolutely correct and agreed upon by everybody. I get that. You don't want some complete rubbish in there.

I do think there's space to come up with a different system where you could say, “So-and-so is professor of whatever at such-and-such a university. I imagine what they have to say might be interesting and well-researched.” You could have some sort of kite mark. You could have something that then allows for self-publishing to take over a bit.

I do just think their system is really, really poor. They get really reined in on what they're allowed to write about.

Alison Baverstock, who is a professor now at Kingston University and does stuff about publishing and master's programmes, started writing about self-publishing because she thought it was really interesting. This was way back.

JOANNA: I remember. I did one of those surveys.

MELISSA: She got told in no uncertain terms, “Do not write about this. You will ruin your career.” She stuck with it. She was right to stick with it. But she was told by senior academics, “Do not write about self-publishing. You're just embarrassing yourself. It's just vanity press.”

They weren't even being allowed to write about really quite interesting phenomena that were happening. Just from a historical point of view, that was a really interesting rise of self-publishing, and she was being told not to write about it.

JOANNA: It's funny, that delay as well. I'm looking to maybe do my thesis on how AI is impacting death and the death industry. And yet it's such a fast-moving thing.

MELISSA: Yes.

JOANNA: Sometimes it can take a year, two years or more to get a paper through the process.

MELISSA: Oh, yes. It moves really, really fast. Like you say, by the time it comes out, people are going, “Huh? That's really old.” And you'll be going, “No, it's literally two years.” But yes, very, very slow.

JOANNA: Let's come back to how we can help other people who might not want to be doing academic-level stuff.

One of the things I've found is organising notes, sources, references. How do you manage that? Any tips for people?

They might not need to do footnotes for their historical novel, but they might want to organise their research. What are your thoughts?

MELISSA: I used to do great big enormous box files and print vast quantities of stuff. Each box file would be labelled according to servant life, or food, or seasons, or whatever.

I've tried various different things. I'm moving more and more now towards a combination of books on the shelf, which I do like, and papers and other materials that are stored on my computer.

They'll be classified according to different parts of daily life, essentially. Because when you write historical fiction, you have to basically build the whole world again for that era. You have to have everything that happens in daily life, everything that happens on special events, all of those things.

So I'll have it organised by those sorts of topics. I'll read it and go through it until I'm comfortable with daily life. Then special things—I'll have special notes on that that can talk me through how you run a funeral or a wedding or whatever, because that's quite complicated to just remember in your head.

MELISSA: I always do historical notes at the end. They really matter to me. When I read historical fiction, I really like to read that from the author.

I'll say, “Right, these things are true”—especially things that I think people will go, “She made that up. That is not true.” I'll go, “No, no, these are true.” These other things I've fudged a little, or I've moved the timeline a bit to make the story work better.

I try to be fairly clear about what I did to make it into a story, but also what is accurate, because I want people to get excited about that timeline.

Occasionally if there's been a book that was really important, I'll mention it in there because I don't want to have a proper bibliography, but I do want to highlight certain books. If you got excited by this novel, you could go off and read that book and it would take you into the nonfiction side of it.

JOANNA: I'm similar with my author's notes. I've just done the author's note for Bones of the Deep, which has some merfolk in it, and I've got a book on Merpeople. It's awesome. It's just a brilliant book. I'm like, this has to go in.

You could question whether that is really nonfiction or something else. But I think that's really important.

Just to be more practical: when you're actually writing, what tools do you use?

I use Scrivener and I keep all my research there. I'm using EndNote for academic stuff.

MELISSA: I've always just stuck to Word. I did get Scrivener and played with it for a while, but I felt like I've already got a way of doing it, so I'll just carry on with that. So I mostly just do Word.

I have a lot of notes, so I'll have notepads that have got my notes on specific things, and they'll have page numbers that go back to specific books in case I need to go and double-check that again.

You mentioned citations, and that's fascinating to me. Do you know the story about Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner? It won the Pulitzer. It's a novel, but he used 10% of that novel—and it's a fairly slim novel—10% of it is actually letters written by somebody else, written by a woman before his time.

He includes those and works with them in the story. He mentioned her very briefly, like, “Oh, and thanks to the relatives of so-and-so.” Very brief. He got accused of plagiarism for using that much of it by another part of her family who hadn't agreed to it.

I've always thought it's because he didn't give enough credence to her. He didn't give her enough importance. If he'd said, “This was the woman who wrote this stuff. It's fascinating. I loved it. I wanted to creatively respond and engage with it”—I think that wouldn't have happened at all.

That's why I think it's quite important when there are really big, important elements that you're using to acknowledge those.

JOANNA: That's part of the academic rigour too—

You can barely have a few of your own thoughts without referring to somebody else's work and crediting them.

What's so interesting to me in the research process is, okay, I think this, but in order to say it, I'm going to have to go find someone else who thought this first and wrote a paper on it.

MELISSA: I think you would love a PhD. When you've done a master's, go and do a PhD as well. Because it was the first time in academia that I genuinely felt I was allowed my own thoughts and to invent stuff of my own.

I could go, “Oh no, I've invented this theory and it's this.” I didn't have to constantly go, “As somebody else said, as somebody else said.” I was like, no, no. This is me. I said this thing.

I wasn't allowed to in my master's, and I found it annoying. I remember thinking, but I'm trying to have original thoughts here. I'm trying to bring something new to it.

In a PhD, you're allowed to do that because you're supposed to be contributing to knowledge. You're supposed to be bringing a new thing into the world. That was a glorious thing to finally be allowed to do.

JOANNA: I must say I couldn't help myself with that. I've definitely put my own opinion. But a part of why I mention it is the academic rigour—it's actually quite good practice to see who else has had these thoughts before.

Speed is one of the biggest issues in the indie author community. Some of the stuff you were talking about—finding original sources, going to primary sources, the top-quality stuff, finding the weird little things—all of that takes more time than, for example, just running a deep research report on Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT.

You can do both. You can use that as a starting point, which I definitely do. But then the point is to go back and read the original stuff. On this timeframe—

Why do you think research is worth doing? It's important for academic reasons, but personal growth as well.

MELISSA: Yes, I think there's a joy to be had in the research. When I go and stand in a location, by that point I'm not measuring things and taking photos—I've done all of that online. I'm literally standing there feeling what it is to be there.

What does it smell like? What does it feel like? Does it feel very enclosed or very open? Is it a peaceful place or a horrible place?

That sensory research becomes very important. All of the book research before that should lead you into the sensory research, which is then also a joy to do. There's great pleasure in it.

As you say, it slows things down. What I tend to say to people if they want to speed things up again is: write in a series. Because once you've done all of that research and you just write one book and then walk away, that's a lot. That really slows you down.

If you then go, “Okay, well now I'm going to write four books, five books, six books, still in that place and time”—obviously each book will need a little more research, but it won't need that level of starting-from-scratch research. That can help in terms of speeding it back up again.

Recently I wrote some Regency romances to see what that was like. I'd done all my basic research, and then I thought, right, now I want to write a historical novel which could have been Victorian or could have been Regency. It had an openness to it.

I thought, well, I've just done all the research for Regency, so I'll stick with that era. Why go and do a whole other piece of research when I've only written three books in it so far? I'll just take that era and work with that.

So there are places to make up the time again a bit. But I do think there's a joy in it as well.

JOANNA: I just want to come back to the plagiarism thing. I discovered that you can plagiarise yourself in academia, which is quite interesting.

For example, my books How to Write a Novel and How to Write Nonfiction—they're aimed at different audiences. They have lots of chapters that are different, but there's a chapter on dictation. I thought, why would I need to write the same chapter again? I'm just going to put the same chapter in. It's the same process.

Then I only recently learned that you can plagiarise yourself. I did not credit myself for that original chapter.

MELISSA: How dare you not credit yourself!

JOANNA: But can you talk a bit about that? Where are the lines here? I'm never going to credit myself. I think that's frankly ridiculous.

MELISSA: No, that's silly. I mean, it depends what you're doing. In your case, that completely makes sense. It would be really peculiar of you to sit down and write a whole new chapter desperately trying not to copy what you'd said in a chapter about exactly the same topic. That doesn't make any sense.

JOANNA: I guess more in the wider sense. Earlier you mentioned you keep notes and you put page numbers by them. I think the point is with research, a lot of people worry about accidental plagiarism. You write a load of notes on a book and then it just goes into your brain. Perhaps you didn't quote people properly.

It's definitely more of an issue in nonfiction. You have to keep really careful notes. Sometimes I'm copying out a quote and I'll just naturally maybe rewrite that quote because the way they've put it didn't make sense, or I use a contraction or something. It's just the care in note-taking and then citing people.

MELISSA: Yes. When I talk to people about nonfiction, I always say, you're basically joining a conversation. I mean, you are in fiction as well, but not as obviously.

I say, well, why don't you read the conversation first? Find out what the conversation is in your area at the moment, and then what is it that you're bringing that's different?

The most likely reason for you to end up writing something similar to someone else is that you haven't understood what the conversation was, and you need to be bringing your own thing to it.

Then even if you're talking about the same topic, you might talk about it in a different way, and that takes you away from plagiarism because you're bringing your own view to it and your own direction to it.

JOANNA: It's an interesting one. I think it's just the care. Taking more care is what I would like people to do.

So let's talk about AI because AI tools can be incredible. I do deep research reports with Gemini and Claude and ChatGPT as a sort of “give me an overview and tell me some good places to start.”

The university I'm with has a very hard line, which is: AI can be used as part of a research process, but not for writing.

What are your thoughts on AI usage and tools? How can people balance that?

MELISSA: Well, I'm very much a newbie compared to you. I follow you—the only person that describes how to use it with any sense at all, step by step.

I'm very new to it, but I'm going to go back to the olden days. Sometimes I say to people, when I'm talking about how I do historical research, I start with Wikipedia. They look horrified.

I'm like, no. That's where you have to get the overview from. I want an overview of how you dress in ancient Rome. I need a quick snapshot of that. Then I can go off and figure out the details of that more accurately and with more detail.

I think AI is probably extremely good for that—getting the big picture of something and going, okay, this is what the field's looking like at the moment. These are the areas I'm going to need to burrow down into.

It's doing that work for you quickly so that you're then in a position to pick up from that point. It gets you off to a quicker start and perhaps points you in the direction of the right people to start with.

I'm trying to write a PhD proposal at the moment because I'm an idiot and want to do a second one. With that, I really did think, actually, AI should write this. Because the original concept is mine. I know nothing about it—why would I know anything about it? I haven't started researching it.

This is where AI should go, “Well, in this field, there are these people. They've done these things.” Then you could quickly check that nobody's covered your thing. It would actually speed up all of that bit, which I think would be perfectly reasonable because you don't know anything about it yet. You're not an expert.

You have the original idea, and then after that, then you should go off and do your own research and the in-depth quality of it.

I think for a lot of things that waste authors' time—if you're applying for a grant or a writer-in-residence or things like that—it's a lot of time wasting filling in long, boring forms. “Could you make an artist statement and a something and a blah?”

You're like, yes, yes, I could spend all day at my desk doing that. There's a moment where you start thinking, could you not just allow the AI to do this or much of it?

JOANNA: Yes. Or at least, in that case, I'd say one of the very useful things is doing deep searches. As you were mentioning earlier about getting the funding—if I was to consider a PhD, which the thought has crossed my mind—I would use AI tools to do searches for potential sources of funding and that kind of research.

In fact, I found this course at Winchester because I asked ChatGPT. It knows a lot about me because I chat with it all the time. I was talking about hitting 50 and these are the things I'm really interested in and what courses might interest me. Then it found it for me. That was quite amazing in itself.

I'd encourage people to consider using it for part of the research process.

But then all the papers it cites or whatever—then you have to go download those, go read them, do that work yourself.

MELISSA: Yes, because that's when you bring your viewpoint to something. You and I could read the exact same paper and choose very different parts of it to write about and think about, because we're coming at it from different points of view and different journeys that we're trying to explore.

That's where you need the individual to come in. It wouldn't be good enough to just have a generic overview from AI that we both try and slot into our work, because we would want something different from it.

JOANNA: I kind of laugh when people say, “Oh, I can tell when it's AI.” I'm like, you might be able to tell when it's AI writing if nobody has taken that personal spin, but that's not the way we use it. If you're using it that way, that's not how those of us who are independent thinkers are using it.

We're strong enough in our thoughts that we're using it as a tool. You're a confident person—intellectually and creatively confident—but I feel like some people maybe don't have that.

Some people are not strong enough to resist what an AI might suggest. Any thoughts on that?

MELISSA: Yes. When I first tried using AI with very little guidance from anyone, it just felt easy but very wooden and not very related to me. Then I've done webinars with you, and that was really useful—to watch somebody actually live doing the batting back and forth.

That became a lot more interesting because I really like bouncing ideas and messing around with things and brainstorming, essentially, but with somebody else involved that's batting stuff back to you.

“What does that look like?” “No, I didn't mean that at all.” “How about what does this look like?” “Oh no, no, not like that.” “Oh yes, a bit like that, but a bit more like whatever.”

I remember doing that and talking to someone about it, going, “Oh, that's really quite an interesting use of it.” And they said, “Why don't you use a person?”

I said, “Well, because who am I going to call at 8:30 in the morning on a Thursday and go, ‘Look, I want to spend two hours batting back and forth ideas, but I don't want you to talk about your stuff at all. Just my stuff. And you have to only think about my stuff for two hours. And you have to be very well versed in my stuff as well. Could you just do that?'” Who's going to do that for you?

JOANNA: I totally agree with you. Before Christmas, I was doing a paper. It was an art history thing. We had to pick a piece of art or writing and talk about Christian ideas of hell and how it emerged. I was writing this essay and going back and forth with Claude at the time.

My husband came in and saw the fresco I was writing about. He said, “No one's going to talk to you about this. Nobody.”

MELISSA: Yes, exactly.

JOANNA: Nobody cares.

MELISSA: Exactly. Nobody cares as much as you. And they're not prepared to do that at 8:30 on a Thursday morning. They've got other stuff to do.

JOANNA: It's great to hear because I feel like we're now at the point where these tools are genuinely super useful for independent work. I hope that more people might try that.

JOANNA: Okay, we're almost out of time.

Where can people find you and your books online? Also, tell us a bit about the types of books you have.

MELISSA: I mostly write historical fiction. As I say, I've wandered my way through history—I'm a travelling minstrel. I've done ancient Rome, medieval Morocco, 18th century China, and I'm into Regency England now. So that's a bit closer to home for once.

I'm at MelissaAddey.com and you can go and have a bit of a browse and download a free novel if you want. Try me out.

JOANNA: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Melissa.

MELISSA: That was great. Thank you. It was fun.

The post Research Like An Academic, Write Like an Indie With Melissa Addey first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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